Power Oracle now fully supports L402 payments

Power Oracle now supports L402 as a first-class payment path for paid compute routes.

The practical takeaway is simple: if your client already knows how to handle a Lightning invoice and retry a request with L402 authorization, you can now pay for POST /v1/compute-power directly in production.

This is not a separate integration surface. It is the same API, the same compute route, and the same public pricing contract.

A quick note on the Lightning Network

The Lightning Network is a payment layer built on top of Bitcoin.

The useful intuition is that it makes small, internet-native payments practical in a way the base chain alone often is not. That matters for APIs, agents, and repeated machine-to-machine calls, because the payment itself can be fast, programmatic, and small enough to fit a per-request business model.

For Power Oracle, that means clients do not need a subscription or a human checkout flow just to compute one workout. They can make a request, satisfy the payment challenge, and continue.

If you are new to this space, think of Lightning as the payment rail and L402 as the HTTP pattern that lets a server ask for payment before serving a protected response.

What changed

In production, Power Oracle charges compute-bearing routes through x402 or L402.

Free discovery routes remain free:

• GET /v1/health
• GET /v1/movements
• GET /openapi.json

The paid compute path remains:

• POST /v1/compute-power

When payment is required, the server can now challenge clients in both supported ways:

HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
PAYMENT-REQUIRED: <x402 payment requirement payload>
WWW-Authenticate: L402 macaroon="<token>", invoice="<lightning invoice>"

That means x402 clients can continue using PAYMENT-REQUIRED, while L402 clients can pay the invoice and retry with:

Authorization: L402 <token>:<preimage>

How L402 works in practice

A minimal L402 flow looks like this:

curl https://api.workcapacity.io/v1/compute-power \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d @payload.json

If the route requires payment, pay the invoice from the WWW-Authenticate: L402 ... challenge and retry the exact same request:

curl https://api.workcapacity.io/v1/compute-power \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: L402 <token>:<preimage>' \
  -d @payload.json

The important design point is that payment does not change the request contract. You validate your inputs, send the same payload, satisfy the challenge, and retry.

Pricing parity, not a side path

A major part of making L402 fully supported was bringing it onto the same public route-pricing contract as x402.

Power Oracle publishes route pricing at GET /v1/payment-requirements.

The current production contract for the compute route is $0.10 per request.

x402 uses that public USD price directly.

L402 uses sats derived from that same USD route price using a cached live BTC/USD quote.

That keeps the billing model aligned while still giving Lightning-native clients a payment flow that matches how they already operate.

Prechecks still happen before billing

Supporting L402 fully does not mean charging earlier.

Power Oracle still validates deterministic request problems before it asks for payment.

That includes issues like:

• malformed JSON
• schema validation errors
• unsupported or unimplemented movement requests
• invalid-unit and other deterministic validation failures

Those failures stay outside the billing boundary.

That matters for client builders. You can integrate against the paid compute route without worrying that obvious request-shape mistakes immediately consume paid usage.

Why this matters

WorkCapacity is being built for agents as much as for humans.

That means the payment layer should work well for clients that are:

• machine-driven
• protocol-native
• comfortable with small paid calls
• better served by exact request billing than by account-first gating

L402 support matters because it gives Lightning-native clients a direct path to paid compute without forcing them into an x402-only story.

It also keeps Power Oracle aligned with the original product shape: a focused measurement API with micropayment-friendly access for repeated, machine-readable use.

Read a little deeper

Where to start

If you want the practical integration path, start here:

• Payments
• Calling Power Oracle from a Client
• Quickstart

If you are building against Power Oracle today, you can now treat x402 and L402 as supported payment paths for paid compute.

Same route.

Same measurement engine.

A cleaner Lightning-native way to pay.